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Boosted by jwz:
kjhealy ("Kieran Healy") wrote:

The most compact, informative, and useful introduction to the Philosophy and Sociology of Science remains Kovar (2001), “Electron Band Structure in Germanium, My Ass”.

Electron Band Structure in Germanium, My Ass Lucas Kovar University of Wisconsin, Madison 2001* Abstract The exponential dependence of resistivity on temperature in germanium is found to be a great big lie. My careful theoretical modeling and painstaking experimentation reveal 1) that my equipment is crap, as are all the available texts on the subject and 2) that this whole exercise was a complete waste of my time. Introduction Electrons in germanium are confined to well-defined energy bands that are separated by "forbidden regions" of zero charge-carrier density. You can read about it yourself if you want to, although I don't recommend it. This relation between temperature and resistivity can be shown to be exponential in certain temperature regimes by waving your hands and chanting "to first order". Experiment Procedure I sifted through the box of germanium crystals and chose the one that appeared to be the least cracked. Then I soldered wires onto the crystal in the spots shown in figure 2b of Lab Handout 32. Do you have any idea how hard it is to solder wires to germanium? I'll tell you: real goddamn hard. The solder simply won't stick, and you can forget about getting any of the grad students in the solid state labs to help you out. *Originally published at https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/*kovar/. Archived version available at https://web.archive.org/web/20070622110041/http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~kovar/hall.html
Figure 1: Check this shit out. Once the wires were in place, I attached them as appropriate to the second-rate equipment I scavenged from the back of the lab, none of which worked properly. I soon wised up and swiped replacements from the well-stocked research labs. This is how they treat undergrads around here: they give you broken tools and then don't understand why you don't get any results. In order to control the temperature of the germanium, I attached the crystal to a copper rod, the upper end of which was attached to a heating coil and the lower end of which was dipped in a thermos of liquid nitrogen. Midway through the project, the thermos began leaking. That's right: I pay a cool ten grand a quarter to come here, and yet they can't spare the five bucks to ensure that I have a working thermos. Results Check this shit out (Fig 1). That's bonafide, 100%-real data, my friends. I took it myself over the course of two weeks. And this was not a leisurely two weeks, either; I busted my ass day and night in order to provide you with nothing but the best data possible. Now, let's look a bit more closely at this data, remembering that it is absolutely first-rate. Do you see the exponential dependence? I sure don't. I see a bunch of crap. Christ, this was such a waste of my time. Banking on my hopes that whoever grades this will just look at the pictures, I drew an exponential through my noise.

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Boosted by ChrisWere@toot.wales ("Chris Were ⁂🐧🌱☕"):
mike@thecanadian.social ("Mike Fraser") wrote:

The BlueSky (and by extension AT proto) vs. Mastodon (and by extension Activity Pub proto) debate is starting to get boring. It's simple, one is a commercial product and the other is not. Each has its shortcomings and advantages. If an important differentiator for you are the motives of each projects stewards then you have a fairly clear choice.

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Boosted by jwz:
glyph ("Glyph") wrote:

@cstross @criffer @jwz it’s a positive feedback loop! Assuming your two upcoming novels are “don’t create the orphan-crushing machine” and “okay you created it but *at least* don’t pull the lever on the orphan-crushing machine” we already know what silicon valley elite’s reaction will be

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ChrisWere@toot.wales ("Chris Were ⁂🐧🌱☕") wrote:

Me and Rosie from a disused railway bridge.

Chris and Rosie taking a selfie from a railway bridge. Also, here's my newest blog post on the #FOSS programs I'm currently using: https://chriswere.wales/posts/desktop-apps-i-use/

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Boosted by jwz:
gleick@mas.to ("James Gleick") wrote:

We can expect these same masked thugs to swarm polling places on Election Day. This is one reason Trump wants to eliminate mail voting. https://mathstodon.xyz/@johncarlosbaez/115077373058583367

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Boosted by jwz:
MissingThePt ("Missing The Point") wrote:

Ghislaine Maxwell must have been sneezing a lot at the end of her interview because she kept saying “pardon me.”

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Boosted by jwz:
Ttubretep@mstdn.social ("Ziggy Sawdust") wrote:

Hugh Joseph Ward
#pulp #pulpart

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slightlyoff@toot.cafe ("Alex Russell") wrote:

The answer is bleedingly obvious: forbid IABs and/or force native apps to use the system-provided browser-overlay systems -- SFSafariViewController and Android Custom Tabs -- where your choice in browser and customisations will be respected. But they don't.

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slightlyoff@toot.cafe ("Alex Russell") wrote:

...and it's the proprietary APIs from app stores that make it so hard to escape one ecosystem for another. The entire point of the exercise is to subvert interoperability, and to do *that*, it's necessary to keep the anchor apps happy. Which is why Apple and Google let FB spy on you via the web.

Apple isn't defending your privacy, it's trying to retreat just far enough into the hedges that it hopes you don't notice how it dangling FB and TikTok to take the fall.

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slightlyoff@toot.cafe ("Alex Russell") wrote:

Instead of taking you to your browser, FB's IABs loads pages in a knock-off browser which doesn't respect any your privacy preferences (nevermind a11y customisations, etc.).

Extensions? Gone. And because FB has code on every top site, that's enough.

FB's tracking is so pervasive in modern web pages that it doesn't need to exfiltrate data from the IAB to track you. It just needs to keep you away from your *real* browser, where it might not be able to join up clicks/taps.

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slightlyoff@toot.cafe ("Alex Russell") wrote:

All of this is facilitated by Apple and Google. It's their SDKs and policies that make this not only possible, but wildly profitable for FB (and TikTok, etc. etc.). Denying you browser choice keeps the big app vendors in the app store, which helps Apple and Google corral others into app stores.

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slightlyoff@toot.cafe ("Alex Russell") wrote:

I want you, a tech-literate person, to internalize one deep fact: Apple vs. Facebook is, and always was, kayfabe. In reality, Apple is (and always was) Facebook's chauffeur; holding its coat while it surveilled everyone. How to be sure? IABs:

https://open-web-advocacy.org/blog/in-app-browsers-the-worst-erosion-of-user-choice-you-havent-heard-of/

Apple facilitates mass surveillance through native apps from Facebook, both directly from in-app activity, but much more insidiously, through "in-app browsers" that FB tacks onto every link you tap. And these things are *rank*.

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slightlyoff@toot.cafe ("Alex Russell") wrote:

IABs are, for FB's purposes, "ad-blocker blockers". Cheat codes for the enterprising panopticon proprietor. You installed a browser, then added an anti-tracking tool to it? And you click "do not track"?

Apple sold you up the river. And the mechanism is as simple as it is disgusting.

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jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein") wrote:

idiocy, wasteful idiocy

https://www.perplexity.ai/page/trump-halts-work-on-orsted-off-J99k40B8TPKea%5FzqIIMZlg

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Boosted by jwz:
StefanEJones@dice.camp ("Stefan Edward Jones") wrote:

@jameshowell @glyph

1997. I-Con SF convention on the SUNY Stony Brook campus.

We put Vernor Vinge and grey eminence of SF Frederik Pohl on a panel about the Singularity.

Before it started, Pohl asked "What is hell is the Singularity?"

I filled him in.

Right there, in front of Vinge:

"What a load of crap. Here's what's going to happen. We're going to burn through our resources, ruin the environment, civilization will collapse, and the survivors will despise us."

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Boosted by jwz:
dnalounge@sfba.social ("DNA Lounge") wrote:

♬️ STAR CRASH: CHROMA SEA + HOST BODIES at DNA Lounge tonight: Sat Aug 23, 8:30pm!
https://www.dnalounge.com/calendar/2025/08-23d.html?utm%5Fsource=sp%5Fma
#dnalounge #starcrash #chromasea #hostbodies #nolashade #indieelectronic #downtempo #chillwave #technopop #livemusic #concert #sanfrancisco

Attachments:

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Boosted by jwz:
glyph ("Glyph") wrote:

@criffer @jwz The reality of that outcome is a billionaire looking into their magic mirror, saying “mirror mirror on the wall, should I oppress and murder the poor” the mirror says “yes absolutely boss. You are so smart” and then they collapse onto a nearby fainting couch and say “oh no! Woe is me! My consciousness has been commandeered by a malevolent overmind!” before getting up and saying “oh well, nothing for it” before pulling the lever on their orphan-crushing machine

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jwz wrote:

Huh, why is my / disk full?

Oh:
-rw-------. 1 root root 1104886787 Aug 23 12:29 /var/log/php-fpm/error.log

That's just 6 days worth of AI-scraping bots.

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mattblaze@federate.social ("Matt Blaze") wrote:

This photo was particularly influenced by two O'Keeffe paintings from her time in NYC, almost a century ago (during her Precisionist period). She lived (with Alfred Stieglitz) in the building at the left edge (the former Shelton Hotel).

See
https://americanart.si.edu/artwork/manhattan-34289

and also
https://collections.artsmia.org/art/2725/city-night-georgia-okeeffe

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mattblaze@federate.social ("Matt Blaze") wrote:

This image plays with the boundaries between realism and more abstract schools like Precisionism and Cubism. While it's a realistic image in the strict sense that it's a straight, basically unaltered photograph of buildings, it deliberately omits elements that might distract from the abstract lines and and shapes that make them up. The black sky (aided by the IR exposure) and harsh, almost threatening diagonal shadows add to the unreal feeling.

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mattblaze@federate.social ("Matt Blaze") wrote:

This was captured early afternoon on a clear day with a Rodenstock HR Digaron-W 50mm/4.0 (@ f/7.1) lens, Phase One IQ4 150 Achromatic Back (@ ISO 200) and Phase One XT camera (10mm vertical shift). 760nm IR filter, which effectively blackened the sky.

This is an abstract view of modern midtown skyscrapers, as perhaps Georgia O'Keeffe might have seen them. The composition is a nod to the Precisionist school of a century earlier, emphasizing the lines and essential geometry of the buildings.

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mattblaze@federate.social ("Matt Blaze") wrote:

Midtown, NYC, 2022.

Wastefully many pixels at https://www.flickr.com/photos/mattblaze/51893928686

#photography

An abstract composition of NYC midtown skyscrapers.

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isagalaev ("Ivan Sagalaev :flag_wbw:") wrote:

Webdevs crying about Google unilaterally deciding what to do with the Web platform is full of irony. You've been writing exclusively for Chrome, and using exclusively Chrome for more than a decade, ignoring all the "weird" browsers that would force you to code to actual standards, and now when a monoculture expectedly bites you in the ass, you're all like, "oh no, Google should listen to us!"

#webdev

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Gargron ("Eugen Rochko") wrote:

He is maxwellposing.

#Caturday #CatsOfMastodon

A black cat (Jiji) sitting on the bed like a loaf of bread, with his tail wrapped around him, reminiscent of Maxwell the Cat.

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denschub@schub.social ("Dennis Schubert") wrote:

for my train nerds: n-Wagen alert!

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chipotle@mstdn.social ("Watts Martin") wrote:

I had mostly talked myself into waiting for the M5 before buying a MacBook Pro, but then checked the Apple refurbished store and found the exact configuration I wanted. Still haven’t bought it, but… 😬

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Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your friendly 'net denizen"):
lennby@laconic.social ("Lentil :fmb:") wrote:

@jepyang
always love that meme

social media post by trash jones @jzux 5/1/22 me watching my friends overcome their trauma astronaut meme image: front astronaut, looking at earth: "wait, I am worthy of love?" back astronaut, approaching from behind with a flower bouquet (instead of the usual gun): "always have been"

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Boosted by ChrisWere@toot.wales ("Chris Were ⁂🐧🌱☕"):
PoliceStateUK@mastodon.me.uk ("Police State UK") wrote:

"#Starmer has created this crisis through systematic betrayal of every principle that brought him to power. He won #Labour leadership by promising unity, then purged the left. He pledged to maintain popular policies, then abandoned them for corporate-friendly alternatives. He claimed to represent change, then delivered more sophisticated management of decline."

#UKPol #YourParty

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Boosted by jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein"):
killyourfm@layer8.space ("Seasons of Jason 🎒") wrote:

There's a really disturbing #Paypal #phishing scam happening right now. Obviously this reads like a typical phishing attempt (bad grammar, a malformed phone number to call, etc), but the official Paypal email wasn't spoofed. It came from PayPal's email infrastructure.

Examining the headers shows that SPF, DKIM, and DMARC all pass. If you have a Paypal account, please exercise caution. Don't click links in these emails. Forward them to phishing@paypal.com.

Please boost for visibility.

A phishing email impersonating PayPal, warning of a $599.99 BTC transaction and urging the recipient to call a phone number to stop the payment or log in to their account.

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Boosted by jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein"):
Lazarou ("Lazarou Monkey Terror 🚀💙🌈") wrote:

@ErikJonker @geopolitics Russia has been at war with us all in Europe for quite some time, it's what those sad fucks do...